the soviets -- continued to hold on and after 1992 there was the famous war that brought the taliban to power. so we did not want in any way to intervene in the internal afghan process. it has to be an afghan-led process. we are very closely in contact with the afghan leadership. president karzai has visited pakistan recently and continuously engages with the leadership in kabul in afghanistan. and the united states afghanistan and pakistan formed a core group in which we slowly engage others. why is afghanistan being so difficult? one minute for me to play professor haqqani instead of ambassador haqqani. history, when the soviets left, a lot of regional powers all ended up adopting the different factions of the armed groups in afghanistan that had and created primarily to fight the soviet union. the americans created a vacuum. some groups were adopted by a random, some groups by the russians and subsequently the central asian states, some by our neighbors in india and some by pakistan so you ended up having different groups, having links with different regional actors and regional p